Technology Inquiry Question

I put quite a bit of time on this task.  I looked at a lot of resources and picked the ones I felt were best and most helpful to me.  I also spent a lot of time on my Wiki as I had trouble getting the spacing to look correct after saving it.  The screencast took me a couple tries before I was happy with it.  But, overall I am very happy with my final Wiki and screencast.

This task has made me more comfortable with creating screencasts and hearing my own voice.  I also feel more comfortable with creating a wiki.  Creating this second screencast has helped me become better at writing my script and being more prepared than before.  I now feel confident that I can create a class wiki and look forward to adding to my current wiki so when I start to teach, I would like to have a wiki with resources for my students, such as the math podcasts and different sites they will find helpful when at home.  

Final Exit Slip

After this course, my thinking about using technology in the classroom has changed drastically.  Throughout my years in school, I have never had a teacher integrate much technology into my classes besides the usual powerpoint.  I feel that the way I was taught has kind of formed my thoughts on teaching.  After taking this course, my thinkinghas totally changed.  I now will integrate technology into my future class.  There are so many more ways I now know of that I can integrate technology into my teaching.  I am now more confident with my skills using certain types of technology. 

New Thinking From Class

3 ways I will integrate technology into Ella's class:

My class is a 6th grade math classroom.  In our classroom we use an interactive white board which the students are actively using almost daily.  Somedays the warm up problem is using the interactive white board, other days the students have to solve problems using the interactive white board. 
As a class, we have a blog that we update daily.  The students in the class are responsible for blogging about what we did in class and new concepts they learned.  Once a week we will create a video about what we learned and how it relates to the world around us.  How the students will use this out in the real world.  This video is then uploaded onto our blog for others to see.  Throughout the year, students will have responsibilities; some students will be in charge of updating our blog, others will be in charge of taking pictures and uploading the pictures to our blog.  The responsibilities will rotate through the students so each student will actively be involved in the blog. 
I will also have a class wiki where parents can find information about the class and what we are learning.  I will include our assignments and daily plans.  The wiki will also be a resource for my students to access my delicious account where I have a tag called studentuse so the students can access websites I have found helpful to help them with homework or fun math games for them to play. 
I would also create some iRLO's with Scratch which my students could use to practice math skills.  Instead of practicing their math skills with paper and pencil and being timed, the students can play the Scratch game to practice their math facts if they are not up to the level they should be. 
Alright, so I couldn't keep it to only 3 ways I will integrate technology into my classroom.  There are just so many ways and things I can and want to do. 

I'm sad this class is over.  I feel like I have learned so much!!  I am taking away so many good resources.  I may have dreaded the assignments at the beginning of the semester, but I am glad I learned to do all these things!!  They will definantly help me as a future teacher.  Thank you!!!

PSA Reflection

As with most of the other projects we have had to do, I was not looking forward to making a PSA.  I have never made a video where I had to edit and add things in.  I also do not like acting and being filmed.  But, as with everything else, I am glad I did this and it was not as hard as I thought.
My group spent quite a bit of time on this.  We were not sure what to do our PSA on, but once we figured out our topic, the filming went fast.  The hardest thing was uploading the video from the camera to the computer.  We did not have the correct cord, so that was our first battle.  Once we got the correct cord and imported it, we had to learn how to use a MAC.  None of us in our group are very familiar with MAC's.  It took some playing around and just trying different things to figure out what we need to do to edit the video (take some stuff out and put different parts in the correct order).  Once we got this done, the adding of text was pretty simple.  I actually learned a lot while doing this.  I feel more confident using a MAC now.

Now that I know how to create and edit a video, I think I could easily incorporate this into my class.  This is something I would want to have my students help with and actually have them create a video on something they have learned and edit it and then have them share the video with their peers and on our class blog or wiki.

PSA- Texting While Driving

New Thinking from Class

Some ways one teacher integrates technology in her classroom:

• computer
• Internet
• student laptops
• SMART Board- cooperative learning and actively engage students, participation
• online collaborative projects to work with peers and connect with other students around the world
• reaching out to experts in the field
• keypal/epal- different languages
• daily blogs to inform parents and assignments online for students, student recognition (others outside of the school), "open classroom"
• Students write blogs about current events(paper journal, now even more current), sharing perspectives, global citizen

could do before
couldn't do before
could do but better now

If the technology is allowing us to do something we couldn't do before or we could do but now it is better, that is the technology we should be using. 

Don't use personal technology tools in the classroom, don't put it at risk.  There needs to be a seperation between personal and professional. 

Rethinking Education- Chapter 10

This final chapter did a good summary of everything that was discussed in the book.  The chapter really made me think about what I need to do as a teacher to keep kids in school and interested in learning.  There are so  many different ways for individuals to get the information that they do in school, if schools do not keep kids motivated and provide them with the learning they are looking for, they will turn to other places to learn what they want.  The learning that is taking place in schools needs to relate to what children will need to know as they become working citizens.  The learning needs to be meaningful and help our students succeed.  The book makes a good point on page 135 that "people need to develop new learning skills rather than acquiring more information."  I think this is very true.  It is not as important anymore to memorize facts and information because it is so easy to look these things up on the internet.  Today it is more important for our students to learn skills that will help them find the information.  Students need to learn where to look for information and how to evaluate its reliability. 

The book makes another good point that technology needs to be used in education to help those who are having trouble with the material.  There are not enough teachers per child or hours in the day to give every student the help they may need.  I have seen this, especially in math, that students struggle and don’t receive any help.  There are so many online math games that teachers could show their students and have students use during their study halls or at home to help them with their math or other areas that they may need help in.  Technology needs to be used to its fullest capabilities.  Instead of having students struggle and never receive the help they need, why not use what technology has to offer us.  We already know that students are using technology and seem to prefer technology learning over the traditional classroom learning, so why not incorporate that into and use it to help where teachers may not have time to help. 

As a future educator, this chapter really made me realize what I need to do as a teacher to make sure my students are interested in what they are learning and motivated to learn.  I think it’s going to be important to incorporate technology into my classroom to keep my students interested and motivate them with new ways of learning.  I also need to help my students learn what they are interested in while sticking to the curriculum.